Rodney Fitch cited Raymond Lowe as one of his three heroes, the other two being William Morris and The Victoria and Albert Museum, where he believed all designers should have their ashes scattered. His admiration for Lowe was simple, he was the first to truly codify the role and practice of a multi-disciplinary design studio and this was the driving force for their eponymous agencies. Rodney believed in many talents coming together to experiment in an atmosphere free of restrictions, keen to answer briefs in expansive ways.
Being surrounded by multiple talents and opinions only serves to fuel your own imagination. Your peripheral vision is filled with the weird and wonderful that shapes your thinking even if you’re desperately trying to concentrate on the detail of a packaging layout, fixing some kerning, deciding on the size of a handrail or curve of a staircase, or wrestling with a complicated UI wireframe. The conversations are multifaceted, the creative attitude and ambition are fluid, and the reference points are far from singular. To be clear, I am not decrying specialism but rather celebrating a studio culture I find the most inspiring. Fluid and unpredictable.
It is why I have been discussing for years, to anyone that will listen, how back to front I find the current creative education landscape in the UK. Do not get me wrong, there is a reason we are envied across the world as a breeding ground for outstanding young creative talent and the home of many great universities up and down and across the UK producing world-class graduates. BUT there is an increasing push to choose your vocation too quickly.
My foundation course was possibly one of the happiest and most inspiring times of my life — having left school I was surrounded by ‘my people’ and we were all thrown into the most glorious maelstrom of experimentation and expression. We drew life, printed, sculpted, produced unwearable fashion, and made many indescribable things that still live in our parent’s spare room. It was the best sandpit I had ever played in, and I didn’t want to leave — but my undergraduate life was beckoning, and so after 6 months, I was expected to make a choice about which Bachelor of Arts I wanted to study. Now some of my friends were more specific than me and quickly chose photography or graphics or interior design as it is true that some are simply born to be a………..
Me, I went for the closest to the foundation course I could find and elected a 3D design course which was Wood, Metal, Ceramics and Glass Blowing! — to my mind this was still an opportunity to have sand between my toes. And so it turned out to be as I continued to have a blast and no two months were ever the same.
With a background like this and a need for a wide peripheral vision, you can only imagine how natural and exciting it was to join FITCH, a firm that was so influenced by Raymond Lowe’s multidisciplinary vision. This post-university feeling has never left me, studio life is as exhilarating as office life is uniform and prescriptive. Free-flowing vs regimented. Now I am pushing for a new degree — A Creative BA.
More recently students are expected to make their creative life choice 6 weeks into their foundation course and focus on a single discipline in preparation for their undergraduate life — what?! only 6 weeks of playing — how can you possibly tell if you do or don’t like fashion design or photography if you only get to indulge for 3 days with each? More importantly, could the things you explore, mess up, or fail to fully grasp influence how you create when you do eventually choose your path? To that end, I am pushing to turn this on its head and rather than a 1 year foundation and a 3 years BA you do a 3 years Creative Foundation and one-year BA — what results is a generation of creatives who are multi in so many ways.
And to be frank this is what many agencies are looking for — young talent that can think in many ways, rather than do in a few ways. Passion and skills that are expansive and designers who see a multitude of ideas when presented with the tightest of briefs — You all know the phrase “if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.” If all you have done for 95% of your creative education is perfecting your illustration skills, then every project in the real world naturally needs a lyrical picture attached to it. Or worse, create a pretty picture and then try and build a concept around it — and I worked with someone like that and it was wearisome. Much better is using a hammer as a door stop so ideas can enter the room, unobstructed. But the room also needs to be an environment that welcomes more free thinking and less structure.
And that brings me to the wonderful Tim Vine and his proclivity for great one-liners — he has won ‘Best Joke’ at the Edinburgh Fringe twice (2010/2014) and was runner-up for the 3 years in between.
2010 — “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”
2014 — “I’ve decided to sell my hoover… well, it was just collecting dust”
But it was his 2011 runner-up that struck me the most.
“Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.”
When an agency loses its love for the studio, a truly multidisciplinary and various environment that encourages vast ideas and tangental thought, it simply becomes a multi-storey car park, which is, as the other Tim says, a crime on so many levels. No longer an effervescent habitat, but instead a predictable, often hierarchical office, where ideas are parked in static rows rather than road-tested, uprated and driven to their limits. But this takes time and it’s simpler to just line them all up and make room for the next one.
To end where we began — Rodney Fitch was once asked, at an event, what advice he would give to someone looking for a career in design. He immediately responded “Be a banker” and the audience recoiled, but he went on to say, with a twinkle in his eye “…if you do insist on being a designer, be prepared to put yourself in harm’s way” And he wasn’t joking — he truly believed we should seek out the difficult, avoid the easy — rather than the comfort and security of a multi-storey office, which is wrong on so many levels.
Rodney Fitch — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Fitch
William Morris — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris
V&A — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_and_Albert_Museum
Tim Vine — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Vine